


i can see the end

by Stairre



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Gift Work, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, POV Second Person, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, The Alternate Lost Light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:21:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27920683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stairre/pseuds/Stairre
Summary: Here is what you don't remember.---Or: Rodimus dies, then lives, then dies again. Somewhere, some memory files get lost.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 26





	i can see the end

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MagicalSpaceDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalSpaceDragon/gifts).
  * Inspired by [(but it hasn't happened yet)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27882874) by [MagicalSpaceDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalSpaceDragon/pseuds/MagicalSpaceDragon). 



> This is a gift work for MagicalSpaceDragon, and is a fan expansion of their fic _(but it hasn't happened yet)_. Read that one first - and give them their due kudos and comments - else you'll have absolutely no idea what the heck is going on. I did obtain their permission before posting this, as is only proper. Go check out their works :)

**i can see the end**

–

Here is what you remember:

You die in the cold vastness of space. There’s a pinprick of heat and light slung around your neck, beating like a heart against your shattered chest, but you are cold, so cold, and it doesn’t warm you. It _burns_ you.

(You have never burnt before. Fire is yours… _was_ yours.)

It hurts and you hurt and everything hurts. You are dying, blasted into pieces, tumbling adrift, and the pain becomes secondary to the numbness sweeping through, a place beyond heat and beyond cold. You know it’s because your spark is dispersing under the energy blast of the fusion cannon that broke your body into too many pieces to be put back together, but some part of you cannot help but think that you are freezing to death with a fire around your neck and your optics too broken to see the light.

Your world reduces. The stars and their distant light are the first to go. Your numb extremities the next, as even that suspended feeling gives way to _nothing._ Then even the pervasive cold leaves you, and there is nothing but the heat of the compressed star still carried by your neck on a chain you can’t even feel.

You’d think that to feel that heat you must be feeling cold to give it something to differentiate from, but you’d be wrong: there is only the nothingness pulling you down, and the heat pulling you up.

Your thoughts – _slide –_ as though off the edge of an abyss you’ve been creeping towards your whole life, expansive and patient and inevitable as only death can be. Somehow, it doesn’t feel like falling.

–

Here is what you don’t remember:

You online your optics to Nyon.

For one moment, you get caught on this point of data. Visual input: the interior of Nyon’s Epsilon Transport Hub, utterly devoid of shuttles and transports. Error. Does not compute. And then it sinks in and you let out a strangled gasp, whirling around in a circle, trying to see if there’s anyone about.

No one.

It’s so silent it’s eerie. Once, the Epsilon Hub was the centre of transportation in Nyon’s south side, and the only one to have transports that would take you to different parts of Cybertron. Nyon’s place on a high plateau didn’t make it easily accessible, and you remember how the resistance and the enforcers both considered Epsilon to be a major strategic location to hold, back when this war hadn’t yet become a _war._

(There’s a quiet part of you that misses those bygone times – back then, it felt easy to say _I’m in the right and they’re in the wrong._ It’s not quite as simple as that these days.)

But Epsilon Hub is long destroyed, of course. You recall this information after a moment, once the dazzle of seeing _home_ fades. Home is gone. So why is it here? Isn’t this… death?

“Hello?” you call out. The words echo throughout the empty station. No one answers.

You begin to walk around, still unsure of what exactly is going on. You’re dead: of that, you’re certain. But you don’t think that the Afterspark looks like Nyon’s Epsilon Transport Hub, though you’re not sure what it _should_ look like either. Some people describe it as _going home to Primus,_ and others as _residing in the Halls of Mortilus._ You don’t think Mortilus built his halls to look like an empty transport hub, though. Way too much graffiti, for one thing.

The platforms are all empty, the kiosks shuttered and closed. Even the ticket booths, when you poke your head in, are silent, the consoles dark and the seats empty. There’s no one here, and it’s not even the silence of after-hours – though Epsilon had never had an _after-hours –_ but the silence of total abandonment. The lights don’t even work, the power shut down, though you can see perfectly, when by all rights some of the passageways should be shadowed with their neon strip lights dark.

There are no transports or shuttles either; each and every platform has nothing but the tracks below to see, and the monitors put high on the pillars are off, no timetables or schedules flickering on their screens.

“Hello?” you call again, when you’ve wandered what feels like the whole station and ended up back where you began, standing on what you recall from old memory files is Platform 16, the one where the Crystal City transport came in, amongst others. Not that many ordinary mecha from Crystal City came to _Nyon,_ but sometimes students and scholars of religion and philosophy would come, hopping from Kalis to Crystal City to Nyon in a tour of the Old World.

“Hello,” comes a reply.

You spin around, come face to face with another mech, the first one you’ve seen for what feels like – forever. Time has stretched and compressed since you woke up here, already standing, and you’re no longer sure just how long you’ve been wandering the abandoned station.

The other mech is wearing a cloak, and, Primus, it looks like he reached up, pulled down the night sky full of stars, and wrapped it around him. His face is shadowed, but you can see a red chin, the edges of some white kibble framing his cheeks, and bright blue optics gazing out at you, the hood catching on what must be a crown of small sensory horns on his helm.

On his front, beneath the cloak, a bright glow emanates from his chest, and it takes a moment to register that that’s his _spark,_ visible behind glass. Looking at it makes you shudder a little. That’s – that’s – you don’t have the words to describe that. Openly going about with your very essence bared? That’s _brave._ That’s baring the core of yourself for anyone to see. How confident must one be to not mask oneself? To show and _live_ your own truth, unapologetically?

“Rodimus,” the other mech says, bringing your attention back up to his face. You flush a little – sparks are intimate, emotionally so, and you were just _staring._ Even if his is on display, that’s more than a little rude.

He knows your name, and – you take a stab in the dark. “… Mortilus?”

A smile creeps across his red face plates, so you’ll take that as a _yes._

“I’m – I’m dead,” you say, and – you’re still not exactly sure how you feel about it. Going out doing something ill-advised and straddling the line between stupid and brave? Okay, _that’s_ very in-character for you. But – you’re leaving people behind, people you wanted to see again, and if it’s your time then it’s your time, but you kinda wish it wasn’t. Not yet.

“You are,” Mortilus confirms, nodding. His voice is – soothing, even, deep. You feel like you could fall into recharge listening to him talk, and you don’t mean that in the petty _I’m bored_ way.

“What happens now?” you ask, because there’s an awful lot of different theories, and you’re still not sure which one you personally believe in, so you ask the one person who seems like they’ll actually know.

“Now?” Mortilus tilts his head, considering. He gestures behind you. “There are a couple of options.”

You turn, as he indicated you to. Behind, on Platform 16, there is now a transport, sitting on the tracks like it’s always been there, the door open, welcoming you.

“You can take this,” Mortilus says behind you, “and move on. Or…”

A bright light shines from one side, washing a wave of heat over you. You turn, automatic, and there shines the Matrix, floating in mid-air, beckoning you.

“I don’t understand,” you whisper.

“You can go forth, or you can go back,” Mortilus says, still even, still calm, like nothing upsets or rattles him at all. _You’re_ definitely feeling a bit rattled, though. “But be aware: you only get one chance to make this choice, and there are consequences for each.”

There’s a lot that you still don’t really understand, but right here, right now, this choice is simple to make. You have people you left behind, and you’ve never been one to back down.

Mortilus sighs behind you, a noise of quiet sadness, as you step towards the beckoning Matrix, and take it into your hands.

–

Here is what you remember:

An explosion rocks the ship as the quantum engines do something that they’re not supposed to. It’s a blur of activity as you ascertain the dead crew members – Primus, already? How can you have failed _so soon?_ – and locate the threat.

Spark-eaters are creatures of myth, of nightmare. They’re not supposed to be real. The one snarling inside your ship looks awfully real, though, and you can see the sparks floating inside its see-through tank, consumed, and you _know_ that you can never let any more of your crew end up in its jaws. They would never reach the Afterspark, and that’s – there’s already enough tragedy in getting people killed. Making it so that you deny them their afterlife through placing them into harm’s way? _Never._

You fight it, and – you know what you have to do. How you’re going to beat it. It’s not a glorious end where you take down swathes of the enemy in a last stand, the way you’ve half-expected to go out for millennia, what with the Wreckers being – what they were – but it’s your duty. This is _your crew,_ and you’re _the captain,_ and no leader should ever ask of their people what they are not willing to do themselves.

_Sorry, Drift,_ you think as its jaws clamp down on your head even as you shove it into the quantum engines, fusing you both there in a wash of pain so intense you almost can’t even call it pain. _Guess I lied after all._

You kill the spark-eater, but the spark-eater kills you, too.

–

Here is what you don’t remember:

You online your optics to Nyon.

For one moment, you get caught on this point of data. Visual input: the interior of Nyon’s Epsilon Transport Hub, utterly devoid of shuttles and transports. Error. Does not compute. And then it sinks in, those repressed memory files unfolding, and you let out a strangled gasp, whirling around in a circle, trying to see if you can see Mortilus again.

He’s there, standing only a little ways down the platform. There is no transport sitting waiting on the tracks, no Matrix glowing in the air. Just you two.

“Mortilus,” you say.

Mortilus inclines his head. “Rodimus.”

You look about. Still Nyon’s Epsilon Transport Hub, still empty and echoing. “What happens now?” you ask again, because if you weren’t sure last time then you’re really not sure this time. “Where's the transport?” There’s only two broken halves of the Matrix left, and you don’t think it can bring you back a second time.

“Gone,” Mortilus says, “you missed it.”

“I – don’t understand,” you say, looking at where the transport should be. This – you’re leaving people behind, people you want to see again, but you don’t think that miracles happen twice. You should keep your head down this time, move on, though you know so very desperately that you don't want to.

“You missed your transport,” Mortilus repeats. He steps closer to you. “I’m sorry, Rodimus.”

“Will – will there be another one?” you ask, and – does – does _missing the transport_ have such permanent consequences as the ones you’re suddenly suspecting there might be?

“You missed your transport,” Mortilus says again, still so placid, unmoved. There’s something unnatural about him, something you didn’t really clock before: he’s an echo himself, a shade, an AI designed to look like someone and speak like someone, but there is _no someone_ behind him. He steps closer.

You step back. “I don’t understand,” you repeat, though you have no idea whether speaking to this – unreal Mortilus – will even have any effect.

Mortilus reaches out his hands, and in a bend of reality, is suddenly right in front of you, and you jerk back, but not before his palms rest against your chest. “You cannot go forth,” he says, “you can only go back.”

You are too dead to be alive, too alive to be dead, you realise, dully. You’ve – fragged up, somewhere. Again.

He shoves you, and this time it feels like falling, slipping back out of wherever you were and back into wherever you came from, from death back to life, but you aren't rising, you aren't reaching for any light. Mist swallows you.

You forget.

**Author's Note:**

> With the Cybertronian gods missing/absent through memory alteration, things might have the potential to go wrong within the system... Poor Rodimus... 
> 
> Title is from _Breathing Underwater_ by Metric, and the full line is "I can see the end, but it hasn't happened yet". The song can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkcRYdUV9e8).
> 
> (Was this partially inspired by the train station scene in _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ , written by She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named? Potentially yes. But remember, everyone, TERF ideology is abhorrent and Not Welcome Here. I do not support it in any way.) 
> 
> I can also be found on [tumblr](https://stairre.tumblr.com/). Come and say hello!


End file.
